


caught up in circles

by sloppybxtch



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Eddie Kaspbrak Lives, Eddie Kaspbrak Loves Richie Tozier, Fix-It, M/M, Not Beta Read, Richie Tozier & Stanley Uris Are Best Friends, Richie Tozier Can't Stop Crying, Richie Tozier Loves Eddie Kaspbrak, Stanley Uris Lives, The Turtle (IT) CAN Help Us, What really happens when Richie is caught in the Deadlights, beverly and richie have a choreographed lip sync routine because i make the rules, mom said it was my turn to write the time travel fix it fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-29
Updated: 2020-01-29
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:40:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22462018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sloppybxtch/pseuds/sloppybxtch
Summary: He wondered what would happen if he just sat Bill down and made him listen. If he did what he did best and talked.If he said:Hey Bill, I’m in a bit of a pickle because I’m actually from the future and I love Eddie so much it kills me, I love Eddie so much it hurts, I love Eddie so much that half the time I wanna puke and the other half I wanna cry but all the time I love him. In a big, dumb, gay sort of way, and I never stop. But I just saw Eddie die a thousand times and a Turtle from outer space (I think) sent me here to fix it and I need your help and I don’t know what to—“Richie? Eh-earth to Richie?” Bill had stopped walking, and was looking at him funny.“Hearing you loud and clear, ground control,” said Richie without meaning to, again on autopilot. He couldn’t help himself. He never learned how. “I’ve just disengaged hyper-speed and I’ve got a beautiful view of Uranus.”Bill looked at him for a moment, and then shook his head. Richie didn’t get a laugh, but he came close.--Or: Richie seeks cosmic help to save Eddie's life, and gets sent on a time-warp grand tour of his past in order to change his present
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 64
Kudos: 448





	caught up in circles

**Author's Note:**

> I blend together book + movie canon
> 
> this fic was brought to you by run-on sentences, em dashes, richard siken quotes, and a stubborn refusal to accept canon
> 
> it might be a weird ride, buckle up kids

Richie Tozier didn’t know what his expectations were exactly when he stepped forward to willingly fling himself into psychic warfare with an evil alien entity in order to lend a helping hand to his best friend—an acclaimed horror novelist, who was already entrenched in said psychic warfare with said evil alien entity (and wasn’t doing a bang-up job so far.) But he did know that he thought it would have hurt more than it did.

That’s a little anecdote he’d never be able to find a way to casually work into stand-up: _So there I was, fighting a homicidal demon clown with William Denbrough, yeah,_ that _William Denbrough…_

He couldn’t remember what he was thinking (he wasn’t, at least not rationally) when he picked up the stone, stepped into the hollow chamber of the cavern, and called an ancient child-eating monstrosity a sloppy bitch. His mouth had opened, closed, and opened again all without his permission, like it had his entire life. All he knew was that Bill was stuck somewhere in _there_ , physically across the chamber from him but also so so far away, eyes milky and fogged, blood pouring from his nose and floating instead of falling in fat droplets on the stone. Bill was fighting this eldritch asswipe, and so far, he was fighting all alone.

Richie thought of Eddie in the last half-moment he had before he flung himself into that someplace along with Bill, left to fight with nothing but his words and a prayer, and he remembered them as kids—Eddie was the smallest then, would still be if not for Bev, and he wasn’t as tall as Bill or as a strong as Mike or as reckless as Richie, but when they were alone in the sewers, when they were fighting for their lives, Eddie had fought the hardest, Eddie had been the bravest.

He thought of Eddie, and he thought _please, be safe, be brave but be safe_ , and he hoped somehow that message was sent, and he remembered thirteen-year-old Eddie kicking a clown straight in the face and thought _I’ll give him another kick from ya, Eds._

And then he let himself get caught in that searing tractor beam gaze, and he fell.

And didn’t

stop

f

a

l

l

i

n

g

Richie was swirling around in darkness—there was nothing, but there was everything, it was thick against his skin, like water, and he was barreling right through it without even trying to move.

He looked around desperately for anything that wasn’t this big dark nothing, for a hint of gleaming amber eyes in the blackness, or even better, for a sign of Bill.

“Bill! Hey, Billiam, come out come out wherever you are, man!”

Nothing.

He kept hurtling through the—air? No, it was something else, something pulsing, something alive. Richie tried reaching his hands out to grab onto anything, dig his fingertips into something solid and stop the dizzying forward momentum he was stuck in like a train on a track. But they didn’t catch, and he kept hurtling through.

Something else seemed to be hurtling toward him, something white that hurt to look at, and as Richie and this other something sped closer and closer and closer Richie realized that it was light, three globes of it orbiting around each other, growing and growing until the light they gave off melded together into a solid gleaming wall.

He tried to scream, but couldn’t, and hit the wall with the impact of a body splattering onto pavement. He should be dead. Maybe he was, because that light seared itself into his skull and holy _fuck_ it _burned_ —it felt like Richie was aflame, on fire from the inside out and he thought, stupidly, about all those spontaneous human combustion cases he’d tell Eddie just to rile him up—and the light was making sounds now, high pitched and constant and drilling into his skull—and then he knew that he must be dead because the pain was too enormous to be anything but world-ending—and then

he

opened

his eyes

and felt cold. And wet. And? Alive? More alive than a dead person should feel. More _achy_ than a dead person should feel. It occurred to him briefly that he had no empirical evidence that dead people couldn’t feel things since no dead person could say they _didn’t_ feel anything, asshole, and Richie wanted to smile because that was his little inner Eddie voice, challenging him at every turn, demanding proof of something unprovable. He could almost picture tiny mental Eddie chopping his hand through the air the way he did when Richie was being particularly stupid. But his head hurt too much to focus on anything fun.

He still saw the lights, three of them, circling around—but he saw them in the way you saw echoes of the flash of a camera, or the sun if you looked too long, sort of rainbow imprints on your eyes that you’d try to blink away. And he could still hear the noise of the deadlights, that sort of high pitched whining, pulsing—but he could hear other things too, muffled things, like his head was being shoved underwater in the quarry by his best friend’s tiny, ferocious, wonderful hands and he could hear Eddie laughing above him but distorted, a hundred million miles away even though the only thing separating them was a couple inches of water.

_Rich!_

Was it really Eddie? He strained his ears to hear the sound through the ringing, tried to blink the last dying echoes of the deadlights from his eyes. Fuck, his head hurt. And his spine, too, like he’d hit something solid. Richie realized that he was lying on his back on cold, uneven stone, and he could feel it, sewer-slick beneath his fingers.

_Richie! Hey, buddy!_

It sounded a lot like Eddie, and not his mental Eddie, but his _real_ Eddie.

His Eddie.

Something inside of him latched onto that and fought through the pain and clawed up to consciousness—his eyes cleared enough that he could suddenly see Eddie’s, round and worried, hovering above him. Their faces were close in a way they hadn’t been in decades, and Richie’s head still felt a little wonky.

“Eddie?” His mouth somehow managed to move, the word slipped out without Richie really meaning it to. He still didn’t know exactly where he was, if he was still in that weird empty place, if Eddie had somehow been sucked in, too.

And in some ways it didn’t seem that important because Eddie’s face was so close, and Eddie’s worry transformed into something bright and brilliant that broke across his face, and he was smiling down at Richie and whenever Eddie was happy it was impossible for Richie to not be. “Richie, hey, man!” His hands were on either side of Richie’s chest. Richie let his hand drift upwards, slowly, still dazed, to rest at the back of Eddie’s neck.

His face was so close, and he was so happy, and all Richie ever wanted to do was kiss him.

“I did it man—“

Richie loved him. So much it hurt.

“I think I killed him for real this ti—“

Richie tasted the metallic tang of blood on his lips, and knew he was dying. There was a horrible squelching kind of sound, and Richie waited to feel a pain that never came.

He blinked.

“Richie…”

Blood streamed from Eddie’s mouth and dripped down his chin—

And then Richie felt the pain. A different kind of pain, and pain that was a hundred million times worse than anything physical. Eddie looked down to something in his stomach, but Richie couldn’t tear his eyes away from Eddie’s, the way they went wide, round, watery and searching. Something warm was streaming onto Richie’s chest.

Suddenly there was nothing, every light inside him blinked out, every thought he had narrowed down into just _eddie eddie eddie eddie eddie eddie—_

Richie wanted to hold him. He wanted to turn back the clock, to offer himself up to Pennywise if it meant letting Eddie live, swim in the searing burning molten heat of the deadlights for the rest of eternity if it meant that Eddie could walk out of this hellhole. He wanted to do all of these things, but he was frozen by _eddie eddie eddie eddie eddie—_

There hadn’t been a scream. Not like in the movies, a striking, dying shriek. There’d been a squelch, and a gasp, and Richie’s name. That’s all.

_eddie eddie eddie eddie eddie—_

And then with a final sigh of “Richie,” Eddie was torn away, tossed somewhere, and Richie wanted to run to him, wanted to scream for him, but he didn’t. He couldn’t. And then—

There was laughter, pealing, piercing, and that laughter dragged him down, through the stone it seemed, and he watched the broken form of Eddie get smaller and smaller and felt the burn of the deadlights and let himself go blind, and still he did not scream.

_eddie eddie eddie eddie—_

(Take me instead! You fucking clown, take me instead!)

_eddie eddie eddie eddie—_

**what’s wrong, richie from the ditchie? want a do-over?**

Again there was pain, there was a squelch, there was a gasp, there was his name.

**maybe third time’s the charm.**

Pain, squelch, gasp, “Richie”.

**you’ll get it right eventually**

Pain squelch gasp “Richie”

**aren’t you even trying to save him?**

Pain-squelch-gasp-Richie

**don’t you know**

painsquelchgasprichie

**a boy who likes boys**

squelchgasprichie

**is a dead boy**

squelchgasprichie

Eyes so round he saw the world in them

Eyes glassy like marbles

**you did this to him, trashmouth**

squelchgasprichiesquelchgasprichiesquelchgasprichie—

**and no matter how many chances you get**

squelchgasprichiesquelchgasprichiesquelchgasprichiesquelchgasprichie—

Laughter that shot through his head like silver bullets

**you’ll always let him die**

squelchgasprichiesquelchgasprichiesquelchgasprichiesquelchgasprichiesquelchgasprichiesquelchgasprichie—

**you’re nothing but —**

There was a tug—it sent Richie hurtling back through that thick, viscous nothing and it took him what felt like a hundred years to realize that he wasn’t burning up inside anymore, or lying on his back on cold stone. There was no light, no sound, no death rattle. His tongue didn’t taste like the blood of the only person he’d ever loved.

Everything kept rattling around up there, in his head, on repeat. Like It had thrown a wasp’s nest right inside Richie’s skull and said, “have at him,” but instead of stinging Richie they stung Eddie over and over, a thousand of them, a thousand times, right in the chest. Over and over and over and over and

squelchgasprichie

_eddie eddie eddie eddie eddie_

Richie didn’t know how many times he saw Eddie die, how many times It sent him back there,left him frozen on the stone, unable to move, barely able to speak, unable to do anything but whisper Eddie’s name like a prayer and look into big brown eyes with the knowledge that this would happen again and again and again and Richie was too chickenshit to stop it, not strong enough to move. And he knew that even when it ended, it didn’t end. That even when he’d somehow been delivered from that delightful deadlights dinner show, he couldn’t escape it. Couldn’t escape the

(squelchgasprichie)

memory of Eddie’s death, so familiar to him because he thinks he lived a hundred of those moments, maybe more, maybe forever. Maybe boys who liked boys were dead boys after all, and Richie was dead, and this was what he was doomed to do for however long he stuck around in the after. Feel Eddie die. Hear Eddie die. Watch Eddie die. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Fuck.

He wasn’t even sure he had a form corporeal enough to cry, but he was shattered nonetheless.

“I can’t do it again,” he said, to himself, to the nothing around him, to the unseen dancing orbit of lights he was terrified he’d see again if he looked too hard. To the amber-eyed asshole who got his rocks off by spraying Eddie’s death across his face and making sure Richie could _taste_ it every time. “I can’t do it again I can’t, I can’t—“

YOU MUST.

It sounded like thunder, almost, this rumble of a voice. If Richie had a body, he’d be shaking. But something told him that this, whatever it was, wasn’t It. This was something entirely different.

But he couldn’t see anything.

TURN AROUND.

Feeling foolish, he spun in the air. He wasn’t stationary, but he wasn’t speeding through this place at 120 mph like before, so he called that a small victory.

It took him a second to blink off the fog, to narrow his eyes enough to make out the shape of something peering back at him from the darkness. It was round, and glossy, and—an _eye_. A big eye, and if Richie looked close enough he thought that he saw stars swimming around inside of it. It blinked, and he screamed.

HELLO.

“Uh, hi?” He thought that he saw what looked like scales, and a large mound of something behind it. A turtle? A giant cosmic turtle? What the fuck?

I CAN’T KEEP YOU HERE LONG. IT’S LOOKING FOR YOU.

“Where’s Bill?”

HE’S HERE. AND THERE. AND EVERYWHERE.

“Did you just quote the fucking Beatles?’

I CAN HELP YOU FIND HIM.

A memory hit him out of nowhere—

(squelchgasprichie)

And even though he’d been living inside of that moment for what he was pretty sure had been a century the briefest reminder of it sent Richie reeling in pain. He groaned, and if he had a body he’d have clutched at his head, shoved his fists against his eyes to keep from crying, to keep the pain from pouring out. “I—I gotta—“

YOU CAN HELP HIM.

“He’s—“ Richie choked on a sob.

HE’S NOT. THERE’S TIME. I’LL GIVE YOU TIME. IT WILL GIVE YOU TIME.

“Wha—?”

STOP TALKING AND LISTEN. I NEED YOU TO REMEMBER. EVERYTHING HAS POWER IF A CHILD BELIEVES.THERE ARE MANY DOORS AND MANY WAYS TO OPEN THEM. THERE’S A PAST AND THERE’S NO PAST, THERE’S A FUTURE AND THERE’S NO FUTURE. WHATEVER YOU DO, MAKE SURE IT STICKS. DON’T FORGET TO LOVE THEM. PAY ATTENTION, KID. LISTEN IF YOU CAN. LET THIS STICK. LET THEM LAND.

“I don’t understand—“

YOU DO. YOU WILL.

“I—“

AND KEEP IN MIND—

Richie waited, waited for something he could cling to, something that would stop the

(squelchgasprichie)

future? The present? The very bad thing from ever happening.

The Turtle blinked at him again, ancient and lazy, and said:

ONCE YOU GET INTO COSMOLOGICAL SHIT LIKE THIS, YOU’VE GOTTA THROW AWAY THE INSTRUCTION MANUAL.

 _“_ Um, thanks?”

I WILL HELP YOU FIND THE OTHER ONE. YOU CAN REACH HIM, IF YOU LISTEN.

“If I listen—if I listen to what!”

But the Turtle was already gone, like Richie had just imagined it. Like Richie’s mind had bent past the breaking point.

But he knew without knowing how that Bill was out here in this living nothing. And so he closed his eyes, and he listened and he listened and

—he heard it then. No, he _felt_ it, it wasn’t a sound, it was a vibration in his bones, in his brain.

It was Bill.

_He thrusts his fists against the post, and still insists he sees the ghosts._

It was a nonsense phrase, a tongue-twister some fancy doctor in Portland had taught Bill when they were eleven. It meant nothing. It meant everything. It meant a hundred things, a hundred thousand things, and he could almost see that languid, lazy Turtle in his mind— _make sure it sticks, kid. Pay attention. Let this stick. And let them land._

He remembered walking home together after school, the sun catching in Bill’s stubborn auburn streak as he muttered the sentence to himself, over and over, tongue tripping before he could get through it once. He’d get frustrated, and then instead of tripping over the words, Bill would choke on them, and Richie would be there, would do a Voice, would make him laugh, would say some stupid shit to distract Bill, to calm Bill, to bring his best friend back to earth.

Richie blinked against all that darkness and when his eyes opened he was in more than a memory.

“He th-th-th-thr-thrrr-thrr— _fuck_!” Bill was Bill again, Big Bill, at least, the way he’d been as a kid. Tall and broad and seemingly stronger than anything that a stupid clown could throw their way. He was wearing a flannel, and his dumb little jorts.

Richie was hit by an overwhelming sucker-punch of love.

Bill labored over his stupid tongue-twister, letting it work him all up into knots, but he was really good at swearing. He never stuttered when he cussed.

“That’s not the only thing he thrusts against the posts, am I right Billiam?” The words came out of Richie on autopilot, like he’d woken up in the middle of a conversation he was actively a part of. He watched his arm raise instinctively for a high-five Richie knew he’d never get.

Weird fucking shit.

He _knew_ that he was forty, he knew that somewhere his Bill was waiting for him, but _his_ Bill was also right here, close to frustrated tears, face red as he shouldered Silver up Up-Mile Hill. And he knew that he was forty, but he was also thirteen—he thought? He didn’t hit his big growth spurt until freshman year, so it was impossible to say. But he was here, forty. Here, a teen.

Weird as hell.

“Sh-shut up, Richie.” Bill glowered down at his bike. Richie didn’t have his bike, and he knew instantly that he’d just been riding on Silver’s package carrier. The way he had when he and Bill had slipped off one night in 1989 to go to Neibolt alone, to protect their friends,to try and stop It with nothing but each other and their wits and a gun Bill had stolen from a shoebox in his dad’s closet. They’d ridden on Bill’s bike, because Silver was fast

(enough to beat the devil)

and maybe because they needed the comfort of holding onto each other to give them the courage to fight. They’d cried together that day. In the street. Once they’d gotten away. Clinging to each other in a heap right in the middle of Jackson. Richie didn’t know at the time that a heart could pound as hard as his did when they were running from a werewolf wearing his name on a jacket. They’d almost been skewered on It’s werewolf claws, and Richie had nightmares about snarling yellow eyes for the rest of his life—long after he’d forgotten the friend he’d loved so much, the friend that carried him to safety on the back of an old-timey bicycle that shouldn’t have been magic but was because Bill believed it and Richie believed him.

They never told the other Losers about that day, and he couldn’t remember why.

Richie stopped walking. Bill was still muttering at the pavement, still trying to get through the word “thrust.” And again, Richie was struck by how much he fucking loved him. Bill was the brother Richie never had, and maybe Richie got on his nerves but Bill never let on, and Bill trusted him, and Bill loved him back, and the only reason that they’d ever gotten into that fight outside of Eddie’s house had been because they were both too afraid of facing the reality that the boys they loved the fiercest were oh so very breakable. 

Richie was the one Bill trusted first, trusted always. And he loved him. Fuck, he loved him.

He wondered what would happen if he just sat Bill down and made him listen. If he did what he did best and _talked_. If he said: _Hey Bill, I’m in a bit of a pickle because I’m actually from the future and I love Eddie so much it kills me, I love Eddie so much it hurts, I love Eddie so much that half the time I wanna puke and the other half I wanna cry but all the time I love him. In a big, dumb, gay sort of way, and I never stop. But I just saw Eddie die a thousand times and a Turtle from outer space (I think) sent me here to fix it and I need your help and I don’t know what to—_

“Richie? Eh-earth to Richie?” Bill had stopped walking, and was looking at him funny.

“Hearing you loud and clear, ground control,” said Richie without meaning to, again on autopilot. He couldn’t help himself. He never learned how. “I’ve just disengaged hyper-speed and I’ve got a beautiful view of Uranus.”

Bill looked at him for a moment, and then shook his head. Richie didn’t get a laugh, but he came close.

“Come on, Richie, I’ve g-ggg-gotta pick up Georgie from p-piano lessons.”

Georgie. So this was Before.

“Hey, Bill?”

“Y-yeah?”

He paused a second, practiced the words before saying them. It felt like his body was resisting anything off script. “You’re a good brother.”

Bill stopped. Scrutinized him. Bill had this way of looking right through you sometimes, kind of like how Stan could, but Bill’s face was a lot more honest about it. It looked like Bill was trying to anticipate the joke that Richie was no doubt winding up to, and he let out a cautious, “thanks?”

“I mean it.” He smiled at Bill, and Bill smiled back. He looked sheepishly down at his shoes, and that was the only time that Richie ever saw Bill be shy. When you gave him a compliment and meant it. And also whenever Beverly was around, but they still had a year until then.

And when Richie looked at Bill he saw all the versions—he saw Bill on the playground in first grade, still bandaged up from the accident, silenced by a stutter but magnetic even then. He saw Bill at thirteen, braver than any thirteen-year-old had any right to be, marching right up to It’s lair so he could spit in It’s eye and kick It where it hurt. He saw Bill at seventeen, packing up his dad’s old Datsun with boxes of books and clothes and every little bit of his life that he could carry. He saw Bill at forty. And love just smacked him in the face again, a good old one-two punch to the jaw. He wanted to hug Bill just as tight as he would a year later on Jackson Street, and he wanted to tell Bill that he’d get to kiss the prettiest girl in all of Derry, and that he’d be one of the most popular writers in the country, and that one day he would marry an A-Lister and have a big fancy house in L.A. and a flat in London and that he’d wear his streak of grey like a fucking champ, and that they would all be together again and he’d give them the strength that they always needed, and in spite of everything they’d be happy.

Richie wanted to tell him all this, but he smiled instead.

He was excited for Bill to find out for himself.

 _Make it stick_ , he remembered the Turtle saying, and then he took

a

step

and walked right into Eddie Kaspbrak’s bedroom.

All the air left his body.

Richie waited for autopilot to kick in, for this version of himself to lead the way, but nothing happened for a second. And then two seconds. And Richie remembered that, _oh yeah_ , he’s always forgotten to breathe around Eddie sometimes.

They were fourteen, almost fifteen. Richie could tell by Eddie’s hair, which was longer than it used to be and had started to fall in lazy curls against his forehead and it drove Richie fucking _insane_. Eddie’d gotten taller, not by too much. They could see a little more eye to eye, but Richie knew that he’d be hitting a particularly extreme growth spurt in a couple of weeks that would piss Eddie off more than _anything_.

Eddie was reading a comic book on his bed. He furrowed his brows a little when he read stuff. Richie wanted to kiss that line between his eyebrows.

Jesus Christ. Or Turtle, or whatever.

Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.

The boombox was playing a mixtape that Richie remembered making Eddie all those years ago—or, like, last week technically. It was a mixtape he filled with secrets, hoping that maybe, subliminally, by some magic, listening to the songs would make a lightbulb go on over Eddie’s head and he’d love Richie back.

 _And you’re standing here beside me, I love the passing of time_ , sang David Byrne. Almost too on the nose. Richie swallowed a lump in his throat. Oh fuck.

Eddie looked up. Richie was still trying to remember how to breathe again. “There you are, dickless!” He chucked a pillow at Richie’s head, and Richie was too slow to dodge it. “What took you so long? I thought you fell in.” He said it all in one breath, each word hitching a ride on the heels of the last.

Eddie always talked fast, but especially when he was mad. Especially when he was worried. Richie didn’t miss the tiny little catch in his words, the nagging fear that if any one of them was out of sight for too long the illusion of their invincibility would shatter. Eddie was joking, but he wasn’t worried about Richie _falling_ into the plumbing. He was afraid of Richie being dragged into it.

Which, well, yikes. Same here.

 _There was a time before we were born, if someone asks, this is where I’ll be,_ David Byrne sang from Eddie's speaker.

“Rich? Say something.” Eddie was giving him the same old Earth-to-Richie look that Bill had given him minutes—years—before.

Shit. Well. “I swung by my lover’s room, if you must know, young Edward. Couldn’t you hear her screaming my name?” Richie pitched his voice up, made it breathy. “Richie, oh _Richie_ —“

Another pillow connected with his face. When it fell away he could see a tiny flush of pink beneath the freckles on Eddie’s cheeks.

“You’re literally so fucking disgusting Rich, like literally, I can’t stand you,” Eddie said, immediately followed up with, “come over here and we can share, I just picked this issue up, it’s brand new and I think you’ll like it.”

Richie reminded his lungs that they needed to inhale and then exhale on a regular basis or Richie would be dead and they’d be out of a job, and he reminded his legs that just because Eddie was the cutest boy in all of human history probably, they still had to keep working too. He shuffled over and settled in next to Eddie on the mattress, felt it shift beneath his added weight. Eddie had a twin bed, but didn’t scoot over to allow more room. Richie was laser-focused on every place where his body brushed against Eddie’s, it was like sparks flew up from those points of contact and branded Richie’s skin.

“You’re being weird,” Eddie said, and Richie fought back the overwhelming need to look at him.

“I’m always weird, good sir,” said Richie, but it didn’t land right, and his voice sounded thin and far away. “That’s why you like me so much.” He knew that this would be the part where he’d invade Eddie’s space and put an arm around him and pinch his cheek until Eddie swatted away his hand but let his arm rest there. He wanted to go through those motions. Desperately.

But he didn’t.

Because Eddie was _Eddie_ —because this Eddie would grow up to be other Eddie, older Eddie—and Richie had forgotten so much about _this_ time, about the wild way Eddie laughed when they were young, about how he smelled—like, super fucking clean, but also like something else. Something wonderful and nameless and purely him. And other Eddie…

 _Out of all these kinds of people, you’ve got a face with a view,_ sang David Byrne.

“Richie, are you having a crisis or something?” This Eddie said, right before muscling his way into Richie’s personal space. He tossed the comic book aside and grabbed Richie by the sides of his face and turned him so that he had to meet Eddie’s eyes. “Why won’t you look at me?”

Those eyes—

(eyes so round he saw the world in them, eyes glassy like marbles)

He felt sick.

_And you love me ’til my heart stops._

(squelch)

(gasp)

And—

“Richie,” Eddie said, face all wide open with worry as he crowded into Richie’s field of vision.

_Love me ’til I’m dead._

“Turn it off!” said Richie, springing to sudden life, “Eddie, turn off the song, I can’t, I—“

The music cut out immediately.

Richie shut his eyes so tightly it hurt. If those lights were coming for him, if he had to feel that burn again—

He pressed his fists under his glasses, dug his palms into the hollows of his eyes like he did every time he cried like this, like he could just shove all the sadness back inside. It was dark, and it reminded him of that place he’d been before, and it reminded him, with a horrifying clarity, of

(squelchgasprichie)

the only thing that could ever really break him.

Was his other Eddie bleeding out as he sat there? In the not-future future? Could he tell this one that when he grew up Richie would kill him because he loved him too much to stop?

Could he tell this Eddie the secret he had a carved a spot for inside his chest, cut so deep it never stopped bleeding, kept so hidden no one even came close to knowing the truth? Could he give this Eddie the only edge that Pennywise held over him, could he hand his still-beating heart into this Eddie’s hands, could he turn the cheek and deliver this Eddie— _his_ Eddie, always his Eddie—something so dangerous and powerful and deliriously terribly world-ending?

Eddie’s hands were on his cheeks again and Richie took his fists away from his eyes.

“Eds,” Richie said, and he was weeping, tears ran into his open mouth as he breathed, he tasted the salt on his lips. Salt like blood.

_Make it stick._

He was desperate, there was something mad in his eyes—he knew it by the way Eddie was looking at him: a lot worried, a little frightened. Richie rested a hand on Eddie’s elbow and then tightened his grip, tried to tug him closer. “Eddie, I _love_ you, I love you so much, I’m fucking in _love_ with you, and please just remember that, please, you have to—“

Eddie blinked at him, eyes so wide with shock they took up his entire face. He didn’t move away. He didn’t loosen his grip. “Rich,” he started, and some stupid part of Richie swelled with hope.

But then it was like a rubber band snapped somewhere and the world stilled and then shook. Eddie twitched, shook his head as if to clear it. There was something glassy in the back of Eddie’s eyes. Something dull. Like he was a million miles away. “You can’t do that,” Eddie said on a giggle. “You never said that. You can’t go off script.”

_No, no no no no._

Richie shook his head frantically, shooting up prayers to whoever would listen, to the smug fucking Turtle. _Let him have this. Let this stick._

“That’s against the rules,” said Eddie again, in that dreadful monotone. It felt real, but it couldn't be, this was wall just some trick— Richie held his breath against the attack that was sure to come. The flash of amber eyes, the child’s laughter, the quick slice of pain and the inevitability of death.

He would let Eddie kill him. Even if he was It wearing Eddie’s face Richie would roll over like a dog and accept whatever happened. He’d die with Eddie’s hands around his neck without making a sound, and that was a terrible kind of power to give someone.

But instead the Talking Heads song started over, and the comic book was back in Eddie’s hands, and it was like a reset button for the universe had been pressed. “Eds…”

“You done with this page? Can I turn to the next one?”

“Did you hear what I just said?”

“Yeah, fucknut, you fucked my mom, hardee har-har. Hilarious. Hysterical. Get some new material, dummy.” He swatted his hand against Richie’s chest in a very affectionate, very Eddie-like gesture. “So can I go to the next page or what?”

Richie breathed deep. He let himself get lost in the warmth of Eddie sitting beside him, in this way his leg was a little fidgety and kept bumping against Richie’s because two things about Eddie were always, universally true: he could never stay still for too long and he never respected Richie’s personal space.

Richie needed to hold him, and so without saying anything he brushed his index finger against Eddie’s hand, and without saying anything back Eddie did the same. It was what they had done their entire lives—clung to each other when no one else was looking, held each other quietly and said nothing about it, loved each other in the silence between them.

“Eds,” Richie said, because he could, because he didn’t know when he’d get the chance to do it again. And even if he couldn’t outright say it, even if it was against the rules to be brave in whatever fucked up time warp he was stuck in, he brushed his thumb against Eddie’s hand and let himself listen to the music and hoped that it said enough.

_Home is where I want to be, but I guess I’m already there._

“Don’t call me that,” Eddie said to the pages of his book, “you

know

I

hated Portland,” Beverly said around the filter of her cigarette. “It was just—boring’s the wrong word, because it was more of a city than Derry is and there was like, an actual community theatre and an airport and stuff, but I don’t know. It’s just like there was something missing. I missed you guys, like all the time.”

She passed her cigarette to Richie and he took it. His right side felt cold everywhere that he’d been touching Eddie in the minutes/years before. His empty hand felt heavy. He took a drag and let it burn him on the way down.

“I don’t blame you. I’d miss me if I were you,” he said, before taking another drag and passing it back. Smoke followed his words. “How many nights did you spend looking wistfully at the moon,” he put on his Laurence Olivier doing Shakespeare Voice, “sighing, ‘Oh Richard, wherefore art thou, Richard?”

“Shut up,” Bev smiled.

They were sitting side by side in the Barrens, looking at the trees and listening to the tinny sound of Mike’s boombox playing in the clubhouse below. They must have been sixteen. That was the year that Eddie decided to Take a Stand against secondhand smoke and banished Bev and Richie to take their smoke breaks outside. “I don’t want to get lung cancer, unlike you _nerds_ ,” Eddie had said one day, crossing his arms and trying to look stern. “Nerd? Oh, Spaghetti, who’s been teaching you dirty words?” Richie had said back, but didn’t put up a fight.

It was also how old they were when Beverly moved back from Portland.

Apparently she’d had a hard time making new friends and wasn’t doing well in school, and even though Derry made her sad, Portland made her a different kind of sad that was almost worse. So Bev’s Aunt Marcia had decided to pack them up and move back after a new start in a different town hadn’t done her niece any good. They didn’t go back to the apartment building where Beverly and her dad had lived, thank fucking god, but good old Aunt Marsh had settled them into a tidy two-story cottage right off of the canal, with a white picket fence and everything. It was the kind of home Beverly deserved, and Aunt Marcia was the kind of parent that Beverly deserved. She was older and sweet and was Beverly’s mom’s sister so she wasn’t even the least bit sociopathic, and she took a job teaching second graders down at the Methodist school.

Richie remembered the first time he saw Bev that summer, after she moved back.

He was walking out of the Aladdin after catching a matinee showing all by his lonesome, and she was walking out of Keene’s, and the sight of her made Richie’s heart burst in the best way possible. He’d almost been hit by a car in his mad dash to make it across the street. “Bevvie!” He’d yelled, close to crying, and immediately scooped her up into a huge hug and twirled her around (he could do that now, thanks to his awesome growth spurt). And when he put her down she was looking at him like she was _really_ freaked out, like she had no idea who he was, and for a long ten seconds fear yanked at him

(oh my god what if the clown’s back what if this is a trick what if)

but then it was like the sun came out on her face and she was grinning at him like she always did. “Oh my god, _Richie_!”

He felt like crying again when she launched herself forward and threw her arms around his neck and he hugged her back as tight as he could.

She pulled away and put her hands on his shoulders. “Oh my _god_ , look at you! You’re _tall_!” She ruffled his hair, but had to stand on her tiptoes to reach. “I can’t believe I didn’t recognize you.”

That night Richie had convened an official Losers meeting in the clubhouse and covered Beverly with a blanket so he could do a big reveal and everyone just about burst into happy tears then and there. Her memory was a little fuzzy since it’d been so long, but they caught her up on all of the inside jokes and smothered her with hugs and just loved and loved and loved her.

Beverly passed the cigarette again, and that snapped Richie back to the not-present present. 

“Yeah, I don’t think it was me you were missing,” he said, fighting a smile at the look Bev shot his way. “That’s right, I know all about how you’re cheating on me with our favorite sentient broken record. Tell me Bevvie,” he lowered his voice conspiratorially, “should we be calling him Big Bill for more than one reason?” He waggled his eyebrows.

Bev laughed and shoved against him. “Beep beep, Rich!”

He took a second to look at her, to _really_ look at her, with his forty-year-old eyes, and he could see hints of the woman she’d grow into. Beverly had always been a knockout, even when they were thirteen and no thirteen-year-old had the right to look that cool. But the baby fat had started to fade out of her cheeks, her jaw was getting sharper.

He loved her, god, they all did, and she smiled at him and this felt more real than anything he’d done in the past (future) 27 years, than any vision the clown had tormented him with. It was so effortlessly natural to step back into himself, to go through the Richie motions, to put on the song and dance and feel his heart swell when he made his friends laugh.

He hoped he’d get to stay here forever. In these memories. In Beverly’s smile. Holding Eddie’s hand.

“Take a picture, Trashmouth, it’ll last longer,” Bev said, and Richie reached over to mess up her hair, and then they heard it over Mike’s speakers.

That familiar synth, those twangy electric guitar chords.

They froze and looked at each other.

“Our song,” they said at the same time, and leapt into action.

Beverly stamped out their cigarette while Richie threw open the trapdoor and half climbed, half jumped down the ladder.

“Cyndi has summoned me!” he cried, and held out his hand to help Bev into their hideout like the gentleman he was.

Stan groaned.

Eddie mumbled “Oh my god _please_ not this again,” and it was _so_ good to hear his voice that Richie almost whimpered.

Mike turned up the volume on the stereo, while Ben and Bill whooped and cheered.

They’d missed the first thirty seconds or so and a good chunk of the first verse, but Beverly tapped her foot, found the beat, and counted them in.

_Flashback, warm nights, almost left behind. Suitcase of memories, time after—_

Holy shit. Was he doing this? Or was the Turtle talking to him through cheesy 80s love songs?

“Five, six, seven, eight…”

Richie’s hand found Bev’s and they whirled into their routine.

They’d been smoking weed on Richie’s roof one night, listening to Cyndi Lauper and talking about the particular Loser they were each in love with without actually speaking their names aloud, when Beverly got the bright idea that they should sign up for Derry High’s upcoming talent show. They’d immediately enlisted his mom’s help, because Mags had been a ballroom dancer as a teen, and under her tutelage they’d come up with a routine that was half waltz, half-sock hop, with an interpretive dance break right in the middle and a liberal sprinkling of unforgettable 80s moves like the Cabbage Patch and the Running Man and what they called The Right Stuff (they’d gotten a lot of their moves by using Ben’s favorite NKOTB music videos as inspiration). Richie was still trying to find a way to work in that awesome lift move from Dirty Dancing.

The whole thing was layered with some truly epic lip-syncing as the cherry on top, and it was so much fucking fun.

Also, as it turns out, his and Bev’s dance moves weren’t too shabby.

“If you’re lost you can look and you will find me!” They lip-synced at each other with the undiluted melodrama of an over-eager theatre major. Richie twirled her away from his body and she did a couple sort-of-pirouhettes that she’d learned at Maggie Tozier’s Homeschool of Dance. “Time after time!”

Richie lost himself in it for a minute, lost himself in the movement, lost himself in Mike’s delighted giggles and Bill’s clapping and Stan’s approving half-smile and the way Ben looked at Beverly like she hung the moon and subconsciously mouthed along to the lyrics. Eddie was staring at them—no, staring at _him_ —doing his best to look embarrassed for their sake. But Eddie wore every thought he had on his face, those eyes couldn’t hide a thing, and right now they were staring at Richie in a way that made his sixteen-year-old body all squirmy and fluttery.

They were just wrapping up the interpretive dance interval and Beverly was winding up for some sick Cabbage Patch action when Richie broke routine.

He held an imaginary microphone in front of his face and poured his heart and soul into pretending to sing, “If you fall I will catch you, I’ll be waiting” directly at Eddie Kaspbrak.

“Richie, _no_ ,” said Eddie.

The whole world started to fall away the way it always did when Richie and Eddie started their weird ritualistic back-and-forth, until all Richie could focus on was the two of them and the little furrow between Eddie’s eyebrows and just how far he could push until Eddie would get all up in his face and call him dumb and chop his hand emphatically through the air and maybe insult the size of his dick or something. God, he loved him.

“Time after time!”Richie pounced onto the hammock, and Eddie shrieked, biting back laughter, and tried half-heartedly to shove him to the floor, shouting, “Rich, fuck off!”

Richie pretended like he didn’t hear him and grabbed his hand and pulled them both to their feet. Eddie made a noise of frustration, but didn’t pull back.

Bill was whooping and cheering for Eddie to join the dance, and Beverly was teaching Mike and Ben how to do these super cool sock-hop moves she’d learned in Richie’s living room, and Stan was looking smug in the corner with his little floral shower cap. 

“After my picture fades, and darkness has turned to grey,” he and Beverly sang, slightly off-key but with more than enough gumption to sell it. They’d given up on lip-syncing, because singing along was much more fun. (He was pretty sure he could hear Stan singing underneath all the chaos, too.)

Richie held both of Eddie’s hands in his and swung his arms around wildly. “C’mon, Spaghetti, show us those moves!”

“No!” said Eddie, but a smile was growing across his face. “I can’t dance.”

Richie pulled him in closer and couldn’t help but notice the blush that spread across Eddie’s freckled cheeks as he leaned down to say, “Just between you and me, neither can Beverly. I’m really the one carrying this partnership on my back.”

“Shut up, Trashmouth!” She said from across the room, and Richie took this opportunity to put Eddie’s hands on his shoulders and sing the chorus again in a goofy sort of serenade.

Eddie clapped one of his hands over Richie’s mouth and tried to stifle his own laughter. “Yeah, shut up Trashmou—oh my _god_ disgusting!” He made a big show of wiping his palm off on Richie’s shirt after Richie licked it, but he didn’t move away.

Richie went to pinch his cheek but instead just rested his hand there. He could hear his own heart beating.

Eddie leaned almost imperceptibly into the touch, and was looking up at him in that way of his, like he was caught in Richie’s

(deadlights)

headlights, like he wasn’t sure sure what Richie’s next move would be but he trusted him to make it for the both of them, like he wasn’t afraid. The bravest little shit Richie knew.

Richie remembered seeing those eyes, older and lined, fading in greenish light—

No. _No_. He needed to hang on to this, he needed to see Eddie like this: a little breathless, a smile still lingering on his face despite the uncertain anticipation in his eyes, his cheek warm and solid and uninjured beneath Richie’s palm.

_Secrets stolen, from deep inside._

And he _knew_ that this was off script, and he _knew_ the universe would press that reset button again, and he _knew_ a hundred thousand other things—but what he knew the most was that no matter what the cosmic rulebook said he needed to do this at least once in his fucking life.

_Make it stick._

Richie moved his hand to cup Eddie’s jaw and kissed the hell out of him.

He kissed him fiercely, like it was a dare, and for a split second Eddie went still. But another universal truth about Eddie Kaspbrak was that he could never resist a challenge.

Before Richie had time to even process that _he was kissing Eddie fucking Kaspbrak_ —one of Eddie’s hands curled into the front of Richie’s shirt, the other hand moved up to his hair, and Eddie dared him right back.

“Rich,” he sighed, like he hadn’t even noticed saying it.

Richie couldn’t say for sure, but he thought he might be crying. The kiss turned into something gentler, but still urgent. “I need you to remember,” Richie said against Eddie’s lips, “Eds, I need you—“

Then something snapped again and he was only holding air. Richie screamed in frustration

and

kicked

the stupid arcade game.

Street Fighter. Of fucking course.

“Woah there Rich,” said Mike from behind him. “Just a game, man.”

Richie could still taste Eddie’s chapstick and he wanted to lay down and die.

“Sorry. Got a little lost in sauce, Mikey.”

Richie looked around. It was night. They weren’t at the arcade attached to the Aladdin, but one inside of a carnival tent, he was pretty sure. Everything smelled like kettle corn and hot dogs, and there were globe lights strung up everywhere, and some kids were screaming (in the happy way) somewhere outside.

Mike had a big wispy cloud of pink cotton candy in his hand. So they were at the fair. “You alright? You seem a little off tonight.”

“Yeah,” Richie said, and ran a hand through his hair. It was way too long. He was seventeen. “I dunno, I just…”

“Missing Eddie?”

The question was so complicated. Because yes, he missed Eddie. He missed Eddie more than anything in the world. He missed who he was before he saw Eddie die in the eldritch demon equivalent of a never ending horror movie marathon. He missed Eddie so much it hurt, in ways he didn’t even know human beings were capable of hurting.

But he also knew that this Richie, seventeen-year-old Richie, missed Eddie in a way that was simpler. Still an ache, but an ache with an easy answer.

“Yeah.”

Yeah.

“C’mon,” said Mike, putting his arm across Richie’s shoulders and steering him away from Street Fighter. “We told Stan and the others that we’d meet at the Ferris wheel for the fireworks show.”

Richie let Mike lead him away. He was just so tired. He didn’t have the energy to keep up the act. To slip right into the swing of this particular memory, open his mouth and keep up the conversation he’d popped right into. He didn’t want to recite his lines anymore. Fuck autopilot. Fuck everything. Fuck.

He’d seen Eddie die.

(squelchgasprichie)

Over and over and over and over and

 _Somehow_ what hurt more was kissing him and then being torn away, tossed somewhere else, someplace else, some year else.

It reminded him that as good as it felt to slip into his former life like he was climbing in and out of photos in a memory book, none of this was real. He never told Eddie he loved him. He never had the courage to take action and just fucking kiss him. He was powerless here because he’d been a fucking coward all this time.

Richie wondered if this was what it meant to have your life flash before your eyes. You didn’t just watch it happen, you walked and talked all the way through your formative moments with the torment of knowing you couldn’t change a thing.

Worse than fucking hell.

But of course Mike was Mike, and if there was one thing Mike couldn’t stand it was the thought that he was in any way letting down his friends. He squeezed Richie’s shoulder and softened his voice. “Hey, man. I know it sucks, and you and Eddie are like, joined at the hip so it’s weird that he’s gone—“

Richie fought the sudden urge to sob.

“—but he’s only gonna be with his aunts for four more days and then you can annoy the fuck out of each other like you always do.” Mikey smiled down at him, and then said, “woah, hey, Richie, are you crying?”

Apparently that was just his default now.

“No,” Richie lied.

Mike opened his mouth to say something but Ben had apparently been playing one of those water-gun games nearby and spotted the two of them right away. “Hey, guys!”

These were what Richie was coming to consider Ben’s in-between years. He was still on the chubbier side of average—big-boned, as Richie’s mom used to say—but he’d sprouted up like a weed until he was almost as tall as Richie, and all the weight had more surface area to cover. He wasn’t yet the stone-cold _fox_ that Richie had seen making eyes at Beverly from across the table in Jade of the Orient, but Ben was a cutie. Always had been.

He was wearing his guileless little smile and his cheeks were flushed from the cold and he was holding a stuffed animal he’d won as a prize. His expression changed immediately when he saw that Richie had been reduced to a pathetic sad sack.

On the ride behind them, kids screamed.

“Rich?” Ben said, and then looked at Mike, because apparently Mike was the default Richie-Whisperer if Eddie or Stan weren’t around.

Richie didn’t look but he would bet money that Mike mouthed _Eddie?_ with a little shrug. Ben’s lips formed a silent O.

Ben cleared his throat. Richie knew that he was gearing up to give him a pep talk. Mike kept a steady hand on his shoulder. God, Richie loved them both, even if all this attention was making him feel like squirming out of his skin.

Ben began with, “It’s okay to feel this way sometimes—“

“Are you going to whip out the Rorschach tests and ask me what I see, Dr. Haystack?“

“Rorschach…? Richie, shut up and let me talk. What I was _saying_ is that it’s okay to cry about it if you need to.”

Richie was doing the thing where he rubbed his fists against his eyes again. “Believe it or not,” said Mike from beside him, “emotional constipation is actually really bad for you.”

“Constipation huh? Maybe there’s something in the Fanny Pack Pharmacy that— _fuck_.” He didn’t need to open his eyes to know that Ben and Mike were sharing a Look.

“I’ll tell the others to save us a spot in line,” said Mike, before disappearing into the crowd.

Richie knew exactly what that shady fucker was doing. Mike _knew_. Somehow he knew. And matters of unrequited love fell solidly into Benjamin’s area of expertise.

Ben shifted his weight and waited until they were alone to say,“I feel the same way, sometimes.” His eyes were sad, and Richie didn’t have the heart or the energy or a reason to hide behind saying some shitty joke.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Like when…”

“She went to Portland.”

“Yeah.”

“How do you handle it? Seeing her, you know.” _With Bill_ , is what Richie didn’t say. Didn’t need to say.

“It’s hard. But loving her’s enough.”

Richie met his eyes.

“I don’t need her to love me back. I’m happy just to love her.”

Yowza.

“Tell her.”

Ben’s eyes widened. “Um, absolutely not.”

“Trust me Ben. Just sack up and do it. Do what I—what I—“

Can’t.

 _I love him, I fucking love him_ , Richie wanted to say, wanted to scream. _Like you love her. And even if you’ve guessed it, I don’t think anyone could ever guess how fucking much. I’d die for him but he dies for me and I fucking love him god fucking damnit_

But he couldn’t say those things. Because he knew that if he tried to turn the subtext into text the world would just fling him forward into another time. They were seventeen, and Richie knew that this was the end of their last summer in Derry before senior year, their last summer before Eddie helped Richie pack up his truck and Richie pretended not to see Eddie crying alone in the middle of the street in the rear-view mirror as Richie drove straight into his new and miserable life.

He didn’t want to see that. And he didn’t want to see his coked up years, yearning and miserable and trying to fill an Eddie sized hole in his chest with alcohol, then drugs, then the sting of looking for a pair of big brown eyes in every crowd and never finding them, never knowing why he looked in the first place.

And he really didn’t want to see—

Well.

“Tell her, Ben,” said Richie, with more conviction. “You have to.”

Ben considered. “But Bill…“

“You’re taller than Bill.”

“Um, so?”

“I hear that that counts for a lot with the ladies. And Bev’s a lady. Sort of. So it probably counts for her too.”

Ben laughed in disbelief. “I don’t know, Rich—“

“You deserve more than just happy.”

Ben just blinked, like the thought had never occurred to him before.

“You could give that to her,” Richie pointed at the stuffed animal Ben had tucked beneath his arm. “Girls like stuffed animals.”

“Why are we even talking about me right now? I’m supposed to be comforting you.”

“Yeah, well,” Richie shrugged. “I refuse your comfort.” He wiped his cheeks, which were now tear-free, and held his dry fingers up as evidence. “And look? No tears. Tell Bev you love her. Give her that dumb little animal and ride away with her into the sunset.”

_Make it stick._

Ben didn’t say anything at first, but he held out the stuffed animal to Richie instead. “Or,” he nudged Richie’s arm with it, “you could have it. And give it to hi—whoever you want to give it to.”

Richie gave Ben a you’ve-gotta-be-fucking-kidding-me look, and started to say, “Haystack, I’m not a girl, your wily ways won’t work on me,” when he looked down to see that it was a cartoonish plush turtle.

(you’ve gotta be fucking kidding)

“Just take the damn turtle, Rich.”

“You really should be a therapist. You’ve got such a way with words.”

Richie took the damn turtle.

They caught up with their friends in line right after, and everyone had already figured out the Ferris wheel pairings. Mike and Bill were sat together, and Bev and Ben, and Stan looked at him expectantly.

“You’re riding with me, Trashmouth.”

Richie looked at his best friend and suddenly felt like he used to when quarterly conduct reports came out and his parents got all serious and Richie knew a lecture was coming.

He gulped.

“So,” said Stan, once they were settled in and the wheel had started to move. “I heard you’re having a breakdown.”

“I _had_ a breakdown, Stanny,” said Richie. “But then Ben gave me this stuffed animal and I think that means he wants to marry me and have lots of my babies, so.” He made the little stuffed turtle give Stan a kiss on the cheek. “All better.”

Stan didn’t miss a beat. “I know why you’re being so weird lately.”

“Yeah? Why’s that?” He half-expected Stan to just say, deadpan, _because you’re a time traveler and two of us are dead and your brain’s probably melting because you don’t know how to cope with that kind of sad_. Stan always knew things, without anyone having to say them aloud. Like he had a live view of what was going on in Richie’s head at any given time, which definitely sucked for Stan.

“Because you’re afraid to lose him.”

“Fuck.”

“Please don’t cry again.”

“Too late.”

The lights of the carnival began to blur together as Richie’s eyes watered up. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d cried this much in the course of a—day? In the course of however long it had been since he’d called Pennywise a sloppy bitch and threw himself into an inter-dimensional shit show like a total idiot.

He could see the Standpipe, stark white against the sky, and he remembered Stan being stuck in there, all alone, cornered by It, and how scared he must have been but still strong enough to fight back when it counted. Stan was never the weak link. Stan could never be the weak link.

Richie wanted to look at him, but knew that all he would picture would be an empty chair in a Chinese restaurant.

“I love you, Stan.”

“I know. I love you too.”

“I just wanted to make it clear.”

“I don’t think I’m the person you should be saying that to, Richie.”

And well. Fuck. There it was.

He felt Stan staring at him, and at the risk of getting too watery Richie kept his gaze focused on the trees below them. Trees were safe. Trees wouldn’t make him cry. “Yeah, you’re right. I’ve been meaning to take things to the next level with Mrs. K—“

“I’ll kill you. I’ll literally kill you. We're high enough, I could frame it as an accident.”

“Is that a threat or a promise, Stanny boy?”

“You’re not funny.”

Richie nudged Stan’s side, feeling better now that he’d found a way to hide, or at least made him feel hidden. 

“Yeah, well neither are you.” He pitched his voice to match Stan’s at eleven, when he said something so weird Richie would never let him forget. “Kookie, kookie, gimme your bones!”

“It was _lend_ me your bones. Also you’re insufferable.”

“Is that Hebrew for the handsomest son of a bitch you’ve ever seen?”

Stan cracked a slight, exasperated smile. The wheel paused. Richie saw Ben gaze at Beverly in his moony way in the chair ahead of them. “Tell him.”

“No can do.”

“You have literally never stopped talking a day in your life, why can’t you have a conversation with Eddie?”

“Why does this matter so much to you?” Richie fiddled with his glasses.

“Because believe it or not, I’d like to enjoy a peaceful day in the clubhouse without you and Eddie filling the whole place up with your,” Stan fluttered his hand around like he was looking for the right word, and then he settled on, “bullshit. And also because Eddie’s afraid to lose you too.”

The Ferris wheel started moving again, and Richie pretended that that was why his stomach suddenly lurched.

“Also he thinks your jokes are really funny but don’t tell him I said that.”

Richie couldn’t hide his smile.

“So when he gets back from visiting his aunts I’m literally going to lock you two up in a closet somewhere until you can figure all your bullshit out and don’t you _dare_ I think I won’t actually do it.”

“Beat you to the punch. I’m already in a closet. So, ha.”

Lamest way to come out to your best friend in the whole course of human history, probably. But he’d said it.

And the world wasn’t wrinkling around him.

“Yeah, well.” Stan said, and for a moment Richie was afraid Stan would get sentimental. “I’m going to put Eddie in the _same_ closet and you aren’t allowed to come out until you’ve decided you can act like civilized human beings around each other and not emotionally illiterate kindergartners.”

The fireworks show started. “Besides,” Stan said, over the first big roar. “You aren’t allowed to have public breakdowns anymore. It’s against the natural order of things.”

“Sir, yes, sir.” Richie tried to do the Boy Scout Salute, and even though he most definitely did it wrong Stan smiled at him, and then it got too loud to talk.

The fireworks were nice.

Richie remembered another kind of light.

A swirling, glowing, orbiting kind of—

No.

He’d enjoy the show.

_Light that burned, light that seared, light that took—_

Fuck.

He shut his eyes, and hugged his turtle tight, and only opened them again once the wheel started to turn.

Once they got to the bottom Richie excused himself from the rest of the group to take a piss. Stan shouted over the crowd, “What’s the rule, Rich?”

“No public breakdowns!” He responded, and shot Stan the finger guns. He made his turtle shoot finger guns too.

Once he stepped into the bathroom he let the mask fall. Felt his smile drop. He looked at himself in the mirror above the sink and half-expected to see a hundred-year-old version of himself staring back,

but

instead

there

were

dozens of mirrors. There were only mirrors. Richie saw himself, reflected a hundred times back at him, surrounded on all sides, and as he spun around in this fucked up mirror room he watched himself shrink down from a lanky, stringy seventeen-year-old until he was hardly over five feet tall, wearing a pair of shorts that showed scabby, knobby knees and a grey shirt that read FREESE’S. Scared brown eyes swam behind glasses that he hadn’t grown into yet, and Richie forgot that he’d ever been so small.

He was in a funhouse.

**found you.**

The voice came from everywhere.

**come out come out wherever you are**

There was a laugh. It was shrill. It was something ancient pretending to be a child. It was the sound of nails against his bones. It made the hairs on his arms stand up.

**but you never did come out, did you, trashmouth**

“Fuck you!”

**maturin helped you run, but I found you. i want to play**

The mirror walls began closing in. There was no way out.

Fuck.

Richie had seen this movie.

**but I’m not who you want to play with, am i richie?**

It attempted a whine that Richie felt everywhere.

**I’ve taken him away from you. I took him, richie. I’ll throw him in a ditchie.**

“I won’t fucking let you, you fucking—you fucking—“

**you already have. you let me. over and over and over and**

The walls got closer, and closer and closer. If Richie held his arms out they’d touch both sides.

**would you like to see it again? do you need a reminder?**

“Fuck you,” Richie said, and shut his eyes, and his voice was weaker than he needed it to be.

He’d die before he saw

(squelchgasprichie)

it again. He’d just stand here and let the walls press in on him until there was nothing left of him to break.

Richie was trapped in a shrinking room with no doors. He was fucked. And for a scary second, he didn’t mind.

Unless.

His eyes snapped open. He stared at the smaller version of himself. The Richie that had run after Bill into the house on Neibolt Street with nothing but his big mouth and the need to keep his friends safe.

The Richie that had been tormented by visions of Eddie— _hey rich, wanna play loogie?_ —but ran unarmed into danger anyway.

The Richie that had turned his back on an unimaginable horror so that his friend, so that the boy he _loved_ wouldn’t be afraid.

The Richie that took a baseball bat and bashed It’s fucking face in.

Richie had never been braver than he was at 13.

The clown just made a big fucking mistake.

_There are many doors, and many ways to open them._

Richie had a way because he believed he did, and he felt the weight of that old baseball bat in his hand. Watched himself reflected a thousand times in the mirrors as he raised it.

Yowza.

“Do _you_ need a reminder?” said Richie. “What exactly did I say again? Oh yeah—welcome to the _motherfucking_ Loser’s Club, asshole!”

And Richie swung the bat against a mirror, watched it shatter, and

walked

right

through

it

into the boarded up arcade attached to the Aladdin. He caught his reflection in the dusty window. He was forty again.

O _nce you get into cosmological shit like this, you gotta throw away the instruction manual,_ he remembered.

Richie grinned, wild, wide.

He wasn’t holding the baseball bat anymore, but there was an arcade token in his hand— _the_ token. He felt the weight of it, and knew it’d do the trick. It still carried the raw, concentrated magic of a child’s belief.

Richie entertained the idea of smashing a hole through whatever fabric of time this was and taking the long way home. Maybe make a pitstop in Atlanta, maybe interrupt a wedding or two. Fuck the past. Fuck the script.

Because he was knee fucking deep in this cosmological shit. And he had never been good at following instructions.

He slid his token into the photo booth’s coin slot, pulled the curtain shut, and when he

opened

it

again

he was in a tux. What the fuck.

He was in a tux, in a church.

This church was Catholic. Richie could tell from the gloomy stained-glass saints that glared at him from the walls, as if appalled someone like _him_ would dare step foot in _their_ house without taking off _his_ shoes. Their little judgy, beady eyes reminded him of Sonia Kaspbrak. He flipped them the bird.

“Sorry fuckers, but I believe in the Turtle now.”

Richie was pretty sure he was alone in here, so this wasn’t a Sunday Mass. The place was decorated with flowers up at the altar and dumb little tulle ribbons tied to the pews and Richie deduced that this was either a wedding or a funeral.

He didn’t notice that someone approached him until she said, “are you here for the Kaspbrak-Rogers wedding, sir?”

Kaspbrak-Rogers. Ha. It might as well have been both.

Good thing Richie _loved_ an afternoon of wedding crashing.

“Yeah, I am,” Richie said, straightening his shoulders. “A little early, I know, but I actually swung by to drop something off for the groom.” He smiled good-naturedly, reached into his jacket’s inner pocket, and a procured an envelope that Richie had hidden there with the power of fucking belief (he could get used to this cosmic, time warp magic-y shit). “A couple friends of ours couldn’t make it all the way down from Maine, so they wrote a letter. Would it be cool if I left this somewhere for him, or?”

The woman who must have been the wedding planner looked like she’d heard only half of what he said, but she nodded anyway and reached for the envelope. “He’s not here yet, but I’ll make sure he gets it.”

Richie handed it over. She was about to walk away, but he stopped her. “Hold on a moment,” he said, and told himself that there was a cassette tape and a Walkman in his other pocket, and when he reached into it, sure enough, he pulled out a cassette tape and a Walkman.

He felt like a fucking Vegas magician.

“These are for him, too. Some nostalgia from when we were kids.” The label on the mixtape read SONGS FOR SPAGHETTI in Richie’s teenaged scrawl. The planner gave him a funny look, but took both things from him too and rested them on top of her clipboard. “You promise you’ll get these to him? Like delivered right into his hands.”

“I’ll make sure it happens,” the planner said, and Richie had to trust her. “Now if there’s nothing else…?”

“No, nope, nothing else. I’ll make myself scarce.” Richie shoved his hands into the pockets of his trousers and stepped outside into the sunlight. He took the church steps two at a time, got a seat on the patio of a coffee shop across the street, and settled down with a cappuccino to wait.

He didn’t have to wait long. A black Cadillac pulled up twenty-seven minutes later.

Eddie was probably at least five and a half hours early for his own wedding, and that made Richie want to cry, because that was such an _Eddie_ thing to do.

The man himself stepped out of the driver’s side, opened the door to the backseat, pulled out a big black garment bag. He was alone. There was no best man clapping him on the back. There were no groomsmen whooping and cheering and ruffling his neatly-parted hair just to piss him off. Stan should’ve been there. And Mike. And Ben. And Bill would have been best man. And Richie—

He didn’t want to get lost in dreams about that.

He watched as Eddie checked his watch no less than six times while carefully climbing the steps into the church. He watched as Eddie disappeared behind those giant wooden doors and he tried not to imagine the building eating him up, swallowing him whole.

He sat. And waited. And prayed to the fucking Turtle that he’d figured out how to work this power of belief bullshit and had actually gotten the message right, instead of giving Eddie an envelope with his Starbucks order in it or something.

He wanted to slip into the pews once those church bells rang out, he wanted to see Eddie waiting at the end of the aisle in a freshly pressed tux. He wanted to know if Eddie smiled when he saw Myra walking down the aisle, and he really fucking hoped that he wouldn't. He wanted to sit through the whole ceremony, fidgeting only a little bit, just so that when the priest asked if anyone had any objections Richie could stand up and scream “I fucking do!” so loud it’d echo off the rafters.

He wanted to do all of these things. But he didn’t.

Because there was nothing Eddie would hate more. Because the choice had to be up to him.

So he waited.

Again, he didn’t have to wait long.

Richie was positive no more than ten minutes passed, fifteen _tops_ , before those heavy wooden doors burst open with a fury.

Eddie wasn’t wearing his tux, he was still in jeans and a polo, and he wasn’t holding his garment bag. He was holding his car keys and the Walkman. Richie seriously wanted to cry. He wanted to run across the street and kiss the shit out of him.

Eddie sprinted down the church steps and almost ran out into the road, craning his head left and right as if looking for someone.

(as if looking for me)

Richie wanted Eddie to look right at him and _remember_ , Richie wanted Eddie to take his hand and speed them away in his fancy Cadillac so they could drive off into the sunset as “Time After Time” played and the credits rolled—he didn’t think he’d ever wanted anything more.

But Richie couldn’t stay.

He believed that he was invisible. When Eddie looked straight at him, his eyes passed right through.

(If a cynical shithead cries on the sidewalk but there’s no one able to see him, does he make a sound?)

And just to make sure his note worked, Richie sat there until Eddie got in his car and drove away from the life that led him to die. Richie needed it to be enough.

He imagined Myra finding the note on the ground somewhere. Richie’s hasty scrawl, on a blue Post-It, a single, simple, striking sentence— _Eds, if you’re looking for a sign not to marry her, consider this it._

Richie stood up, felt for the token in his pocket, dropped it onto the pavement and

picked

it

up

on the street outside of Stan’s house. Grown-up Stan’s house. Richie wasn’t in a tux anymore. The sun made the air hot and sticky, the magnolia trees all around were in full bloom. He hoped that this was sometime before May 29, 2016, but then he knew that it was.

Both the cars were in the driveway. Richie walked up the steps, rang the bell.

When Stan answered—grown-up Stan—it took all of five seconds before recognition broke across his face and he pulled Richie in for a crushing hug.

“Listen Stanny, this is super important,” Richie said into Stan’s shoulder. “I can’t stay long—beautiful house by the way, good job on the landscaping, it’s all Home & fucking Garden out here—and I can’t explain it all right now, but Mike is going to call you soon, and we’re going to have to go back to Derry, and you’re going to have an idea that you _think_ is good, but Stan? Don’t fucking do it. Seriously. Don’t do it. If you do it, Eddie dies. Remember him, about yay high, usually feral? Well if you do what you think you have to do, he’s gone. And I need you both. And _we_ need you. The Losers. You’re the glue, Stan. You held us together. And we need you. Capiche?”

Stan just blinked at him. “Capiche. Can I get you a drink, or…?”

Richie smiled and clapped him on the shoulder. “I’ll take you up on that in about a week, alright?”

Stan just nodded. “You’re such a fucking weirdo.”

“I learned it from you,” Richie said, wiggling his finger and imitating a younger Stan’s voice to say, “kookie, kookie.” He believed Stan would listen to him. He believed Stan would remember this. He didn’t know if space magic worked that way on other people, but he believed. Then he had a better idea.

“Wait, Stan,” Richie held out his pinky. “Promise.”

Stan smiled his signature little half-smile and linked their pinkies together. “Promise.”

Richie pulled him in for one more hug and as he pulled away he said, “you know how when we were kids we believed that if you broke a pinky promise your finger would fall off?”

“Yeah?”

“Well, same principle applies.”

Once the door shut behind him, Richie dropped his token on the pavement, and bent down to pick it up.

—

He helped things along for the others, too.

He made sure Tom Rogan never got the chance to lay a hand on Beverly. He didn’t kill him, but some part of Richie knew that he would have if it came down to it. The dark deep part of Richie that felt the thud of the axe going through Henry Bowers’ skull and who would have swung again and again and again.

He sent Bill anonymous fan-mail every now and again, and asked him to write about happier things. He kept it real and still told Bill that his endings were shit (because they were), but he wrote that the endings sucked because all of the big brothers in Bill’s work ended up leading miserable, tragic lives, and big brothers deserve happy endings, too. He hoped it brought some comfort, but he was also pretty sure that his brilliant pen names—“Hugh Jass” and “Mike Oxbig” and “Holden MaGroin,” to name a few—ran the risk of diluting the positive message.

He tried to sign Mike up for a dating app service, because he felt like if Mike was going to be stuck in the shithole that was Derry waiting for them to remember him 27 years later, he might as well be getting laid on the regular. But that plan fell through because Richie forgot that Mike never forgot him. So when Richie believed himself right into the lobby of the Derry Library and got ready to use one of his Voices to charm the receptionist into giving him Mike’s email address (“for professional purposes only,” he would have said), and rang the bell on the counter for assistance, the last thing he expected to see was _Mike_ himself coming out of the back office

(because apparently richie and complete fucking dumbass were listed as synonyms in the dictionary)

And he was caught so off guard that he gave out a surprised little yelp-scream hybrid, which just made Mike look up and do his own little yelp-scream, and so Richie dropped his token on the ground and pretended like he had to tie his shoes behind the cover of the desk and disappeared, literally, into the floor.

Finally, he gave Ben the little stuffed turtle back, infused with all the childhood magic they’d given it that day at the fair, and prayed that one day Haystack would remember what to do with it.

After that, he was back in the arcade. He deposited his token into the coin slot of the photo booth, pulled the red curtain closed, thought of

home.

And ended up in that swirling nothing.

How long had it been since he’d been there? How long had he spent hopping between snapshots of his life?

And how long had he spent _trapped_ here? Had any time passed, or would he wake up a hundred years from now, withered but alive, surrounded by the skeletons of his friends and holy shit eddie eddie eddie eddie—

AY PLUS.

“Huh?” said Richie.

AY PLUS.

And then he was sent hurtling backwards, like something had fastened a rope around his middle and attached the other end of it to a freight train.

Those lights were rushing towards him, almost faster than he remembered, and they were growing growing growing—

Into that brilliant, solid, molten wall.

Richie felt his insides catch fire again, felt the searing gleaming heat force itself between his closed eyelids and shoot flame into his brain, and he heard the voice of It.

**the prodigal fairy flies home.**

Richie laughed.

**aren’t you a little too old for this?**

Richie wasn’t sure, but he thought he sensed fear. And he laughed again. “Hey bitch, you’re never too old for rock n’ roll.”

**don’t you want to see your darling little eds again, don’t you want to see all the fun things I can do to him, don’t you want to see how far he’ll fly—**

At the exact same moment that a terrified risk analyst flung an otherwise perfectly mundane iron post straight into the gullet of a monster, an iron post that was only dangerous because he had the unwavering, resolute knowledge that it was—Richie Tozier’s face split into a wild, mad grin, and he yelled with everything he could at the prowling, salivating _clown_ holding him hostage in his own mind, “I’m not _fucking_ afraid of you!”

The world fell away.

Richie was flying—or falling. Or floating? It was hard to tell the difference anymore—

And it felt like something was pulling him back to earth by his spine. Like a grappling hook was lodged right between his vertebrae, and that whatever was at the other end of it was doing its best to separate body from bone.

It was a pain almost worse than the burning and—

It stopped. His back hit something solid with enough force to knock all the air out of his lungs. He was blinded by the echoes of light, his ears were useless against a residual, high pitched ringing—

He’d been here before.

“Rich!”

Fuck he had to _move_ , but apparently being tossed around through dimensions and then dropped from at least fifty feet had a way of messing with a guy’s mobility.

Fuck fuck fuck fuck—

“Richie, hey buddy, Rich—“

He needed to—

“Richie, I did it—“

speak, but it was like his lips had forgotten all other words but _eddie_ and he tried to say that one but he needed air to get the sound out and currently he was operating on empty and holy fuck _eddie eddie eddie eddie eddie—_

His vision cleared enough to see those eyes. Those eyes.

He tried desperately to get his limbs to move, managed to get his arm up to Eddie’s, tried to tug, tried to crawl, tried to fucking barrel roll but it was like his body was operated thirty seconds behind his brain and he started to cry because apparently his tear ducts were the only part of him that fucking _worked_ and—

“Richie, I killed It for—“

He braced himself, he let his lips silently form Eddie’s name over and over, he didn’t have time, he never had time, he just _let Eddie die_ time and time and time and time and—

“Kookie, kookie, lend me your mother _fucking_ bones, bitch!”

Was that—

Eddie looked over his shoulder in the direction of the voice. Wait, Eddie was able to look over his shoulder—wait, Eddie was alive holy shit eddie eddie eddie—

“Oh my god, Rich, we’ve gotta fucking move!” And Eddie scrabbled off of him and got his arms beneath Richie’s and half-carried, half-dragged him backwards until they were hidden behind a giant slab of stone.

Richie looked dumbly at him. Raised his hand to touch his cheek. “Eds, you’re alive…”

Eddie smiled. Leaned into the touch. “Yeah, you are, too,” Eddie raised his own hand to Richie’s cheek. He brushed away a tear. “But don’t call me Eds, asshole.”

They looked at each other, something heavy in the air between them, but they were interrupted by Beverly screaming Bill’s name. Eddie held Richie’s gaze for a moment more, and for a wild, insane second Richie thought that Eddie might _kiss_ him. “C’mon, we’ve got some unfinished business to take care of,” he patted Richie’s cheek once and then took his hand away.

Richie was still lost in the haze of _eddie’s alive eddie’s alive eddie’s alive_

“Hey, Earth to dipshit, you in there, buddy?” Eddie waved his hand in front of Richie’s face and he couldn’t help but notice the worry written plain across his features.

“That’s what your mom asks when I’m fu—“

“Yup, there he is,” Eddie smiled fondly, and then slung Richie’s arm over his shoulder and stood them both up. Richie tested his weight beneath his feet. “Can you walk?”

Richie didn’t see any other option, because Beverly was out there shouting for Bill, and he could hear the horrible scrabble-scrape of massive pincers dragging across the stone, and because this was no time for him to go completely catatonic.

He picked up the rock that he’d dropped when Pennywise did his best to make Richie float forever, and shook off Eddie’s arm, and strode back into the fray on shaky but solid steps.

And he saw Stan.

And then he started crying again.

Stan was _here_ and Stan was _alive_ and Stan was

(kookie kookie lend me your bones)

Holy shit, Stan was so _weird_ but Stan had saved Eddie’s fucking life and Stan was unhurt and smiling and fierce and _breathing_. He had his own arsenal of rocks and was letting them fly, and Richie remembered he was the only one of the seven who had played baseball.

They locked eyes from across the cistern, just for a moment, and Stan shot him a smile and lifted his pinkie finger in the air.

God, he loved him.

Richie took stock of the situation—he and Eddie were here, Stan was across the way with Mike, pelting It with rocks to distract It while Ben supported a newly-conscious Bill as he stumbled to his feet. When Richie caught Bill’s eyes, he knew that the seven of them were unstoppable.

Because they were no longer afraid. 

Then came the easy part.

Stan had a particular bone to pick with It, and with each brutal hit of stone against spider-skin Stan tossed out an insult, too. Each one seemed to land harder than the one before. It wasn’t bleeding, or maimed, but Richie knew that It was injured. It’s form had started to wither and deflate, like a week-old red fucking balloon, and It was weak. Richie and Bill had already gone in and wreaked havoc on It’s inside, and Stan—wonderful, strong, strange, sass-master Stan, Stan whose bite-scars gleamed green in the light—had found the Achilles’ heel that would fell the beast.

They all caught on.

“Clown!”

“Bully!”

“Dumb fucking mummy!”

It shrunk and shrunk and shrunk, until there was hardly anything left, and Richie and Eddie held hands as they watched It die.

The lucky seven held It’s beating, rancid heart in their hands, and they held nothing back.

And walked out of the wreckage of Neibolt, whole.

The next day (once they were all washed up and had slept for a blissful fifteen hours) Richie and Eddie stood in front of a carefully carved _R+E_ and shared their second first kiss.

“Oh my fucking _god_ ,” Eddie said as they broke apart. “It was _you_.”

Richie was still a little drunk off the feeling of Eddie’s lips on his, and very confused about whatever fuck-up his former self had committed that Eddie was just now remembering. “Wha’ was me?’

That tiny little line that Richie loved so fucking much appeared between Eddie’s eyebrows. “You stopped my fucking wedding.” Eddie jabbed him square in the chest with an accusatory finger. Richie caught his hand and kept it there.

“What, are you mad?”

“Am I _mad_?”

“You sound mad.” Richie hooked a finger through Eddie’s belt loop and tugged him a little closer. They were always so good at invading each other’s personal space.

“Am I _mad_ that you stopped my _wedding_?” Eddie’s face was cycling through a dozen different expressions at once and Richie really wanted to keep on kissing him.

“Are you asking me?”

“No, dipshit!” Richie hadn't known that there was an affectionate way to call someone a dipshit until he’d remembered Eddie again. “I’m not mad that you stopped my wedding!” Eddie took a deep breath through his nose. A Rant was coming on. “I’m mad that you didn’t stick around! I was—oh my god I was _looking_ for you, asshole!”

“Looking for me conceptually, like ‘who’s the dude who hijacked my big day’ or…?”

“I listened to your stupid mixtape.” As he spoke Eddie chopped the air between them with his hand—one of Richie’s favorite Eddie-isms—but he kept the other one against his chest, over his heart. “I listened to it and I was reading your note over and over and trying to figure out what about it felt so familiar and I made it halfway through ‘Time After Time’ by Cyndi _fucking_ Lauper and then I remembered you—not everything, but _you_ , the important stuff, what I felt, what—and then Laurie—“

“Who?”

“The wedding planner, jackass. Keep up. And then Laurie told me that a big tall dork with dumb fucking glasses—“

“Laurie called my glasses dumb?”

“Shut the fuck up. She _said_ that you dropped it off and told her that it was very important and then you just _left_ and I _looked_ for you, dickhead, I looked everywhere for you and then I got into my car and—fuck, I probably would have driven to Maine or L.A. or wherever you were if my brain hadn’t gone all foggy and I forgot what I was doing halfway out of New York fucking state!”

“Oh. So you’re mad.”

“Yes, I’m _mad_.” Something changed in Eddie’s voice, and it made Richie hold him closer. “I’m mad because—I’m mad because, _fuck_ , I’m mad because I _remembered_ you and you were _there_ but then you left and I didn’t get to—didn’t—“

Eddie grabbed Richie by the shirt collar and kissed him like it was a dare, like he had during their first first kiss. He held onto Richie, drew him closer, like they could never ever get close enough. Richie could get used to Eddie kissing the hell out of him like this. For every day of his fucking life. He let himself get lost in the feeling and then Eddie murmured, “marry me,” against his lips.

Yowza.

Holy

Shit.

Richie was pretty sure he was ascending to a higher plane of existence. He pulled away and let their noses bump together and said, “sorry, what was that, couldn’t quite make it out.”

“Fuck off,” Eddie said, pressed one more fierce kiss to Richie’s lips. Richie tried and failed to fight back a smile. “Do you want me to get down on one knee or something?”

“Both knees, preferably.”

“I can’t fucking stand you. Marry me.”

“Say it again.”

Eddie pulled back far enough that he could see all of Richie’s face, and put both of his hands against Richie’s cheeks. His expression was earnest and vulnerable and ferocious and there was so much love there, in his eyes, and Richie realized that there had always been. In every glance, in every glare, every shared look across a room. All their lives.

Eddie brushed his thumb along Richie’s cheekbone. “Marry me.”

Fuck, he loved him.

Richie grinned, and Eddie grinned back, and Richie pressed a kiss to that smile and then peppered smaller ones all across the rest of Eddie’s face. Richie was crying—because _of course_ he was—when he said, “God, yes. A thousand times, Eds. A thousand fucking times.”

They held each other, wiped away tears, kissed long and searching and slow because they had the rest of forever to do exactly this.

“Would this be a bad time,” Richie said between kisses, “to tell you that Ben gave me a prize he won at a fair when we were 17 so I’m pretty sure that means I’ve already pledged him my hand in marriage?”

“I hate you so much,” Eddie laughed against his lips.

“No you don’t.”

“No I don’t.”

Thank the Turtle god for small miracles.

**Author's Note:**

> must a fic make sense? is it not enough to save stan+eddie and call it a day?
> 
> \---
> 
> pretty please comment your thoughts! they absolutely make my day
> 
> —-  
> also! if any of you have interest in the rest of the songs for spaghetti playlist, here’s mine that i used as inspo (i imagine half of it are songs that richies using to pour out his heart and soul and the other half are 80s bops that he sings goofily at eddie and is all like it’s a joke...unless? 👀)
> 
> songs for spaghetti 


End file.
